The aftermath of Gartner’s META purchase

Last week we were lucky enough to get some time to speak with Chris Lafond, Gartner’s CFO, and discuss the integration of META’s operations. It’s an issue of great interest to readers of this blog, and the objective limits on Gartner’s ability to say more earlier clearly worried some earlier this year, even to the point of some folk suggesting that customers should avoid them .

I’m hoping to complete my notes soon, but there’s one nugget that I thought would interest readers.

On April 1 2005, Gartner offered nearly 300 META associates a position. That represents nearly half of the workforce META had at that time (according to my records, that’s down from 660 in 2004 and 715 in 2003). Gartner says that 38% were in sales, 30% in research and executive programs, 18% in Consulting, 7% in client services, with the remainder throughout Events, Marketing and other functions.

To date, Gartner tells me it has retained 90% of those associates: so that could be as many as 270 people (but the exact number wasn’t to hand in our conversation).

That’s resolved an interesting discussion we’ve touched on before. If we say that META had around 660 people when the deal was agreed, and Gartner now has 270 (both those numbers are probably too high) then that suggests that two-fifths of META people have made the transition to Gartner.